August 20, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Sabine Ducasse: Melting Pot

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Perler beads—the small plastic beads that fuse together when ironed—were a favorite craft project material with Em and Dan for years, especially when they were younger. For a while we had stacks of the melted bead designs the size of coasters lying around, but attempts at more elaborate constructions proved difficult to execute without breakage. That’s why French designer Sabine Ducasse’s Melting Pot fashions are that much more impressive to us.

Ducasse used the beads to create East-meets-West armor style fashion; a melting pot of cultures with a literal take on “melting”. These amazingly well-crafted pixelated design pieces won the designer a scholarship at the International Fashion Academy. Nice!

via kerrysoup/the creator’s project

August 17, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

NYC Culture on the Cheap: Weekend 8/17

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Our picks for free and cheap art, music, performance, and food events this weekend (August 17 through 19, 2012) in New York City:

1. Music/Dance/Food– Lunch Break lunchtime dance party; DJ Michna at Le Poisson Rouge with free lunch and vodka. Friday 8/17 at 1 to 2pm. FREE 21+ RSVP

2. Food/Music/Sport – Jaguar Chill, Life-size snow globe at the High Line housing a skating rink including free skates, demos from professional skaters, and some Jaguars. Plus treats that (at least when we were there yesterday evening) included People’s Pops, Van Leeuwen ice cream, pulled pork sliders and more, as well as beverages, all free. 10th Ave and 17th St. Friday 8/17 12pm- 8pm, Saturday 8/18 12pm-5pm. FREE

3. Art/Beach – Rockaway Beach Sandcastle Competition Watch artists Ryan McNamara, Tom Sachs, Snarkitecture and more battle it out with their sand creations. Friday 8/17 at 3pm. 86th Street Beach. FREE.

4. Music/Art – Dumbo Summer Friday. An evening of music, art and technology underneath the DUMBO Archway with bands Bosco Delrey, Zambri, Prince Rama, and Javelin. Friday 8/17, 2pm-9pm. FREE.

5. Film/Party – Love Story by Florian Habicht. A funny meta-fictional romance. Rooftop films. 350 Grand Street. Friday 8/17, 8pm – 1am (film at 9pm).$12

6. Music – Though not exactly NYC, the Lackawaana Music Festival is just a Path ride away in Hoboken. Tokyo Police Club, Vacationer, and many more. Pier A, Hoboken. Saturday 8/18, 12pm to 1 am. FREE

7. Theater – Mormon in Chief. Unassuming Mormon, Connor Jorgensen, becomes the center of national media frenzy when his tweets about a Mormon presidential candidate go viral. Play by Matthew Greene. Saturday 8/18 at noon, Sunday 8/19 at 7pm. $15 in advance, $18 at door. Much more theater at FringeNYC.

8. Art/Photography – Lunch Hour NYC at the NY Public Library, Friday 8/17 and Saturday 8/18, 10am-6pm. Continues through February 17, 2013. FREE

9. Music – The Kills; Hudson River Park Pier 63, Saturday 8/18, 5pm. FREE

10. Music/Dance/Food – Jazz-Age Lawn Party on Governors Island. “One of the most memorable parties of 2009 and 2010” says the New York Times. Dress up in your best vintage clothing and head on over. Saturday 8/18 and Sunday 8/19, 11am to 5pm. $15.

Also, similar but totally different – Improv Everywhere’s zany Black Tie Beach. Saturday 8/18. Location to be disclosed Friday (today). FREE

11. Comedy/Performance – Upright Citizens Brigade All-Stars of Improv. East River Park Band Shell, Cherry St. and FDR. Sunday 8/19, 7pm to 8:30pm. FREE

12. Drink/Fun/Views – One of NYC’s best kept secrets: The WillyWall, Manhattan Sailing Club’s floating clubhouse sits in the Hudson River with a bar atop and beautiful views of Manhattan, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Reserve Admiral’s Launch boat service to WillyWall which departs every half hour from North Cove Dock in Battery Park City. Fridays 5:30pm to 10pm. Saturdays 3pm to 10pm. $10.

Also in Film: Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg opens. The director will be speaking at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at two screenings. Friday 8/17, 6:30pm and 9:15pm.$13.

Also in Food/Music/Beach: Back to the Beach in Staten Island. Music, food and activities plus fireworks. Saturday 8/18 and Sunday 8/19. Noon to 9pm. FREE

Also in Art: Quay Brothers at MoMA. Great show. Through January 7th. FREE Fridays from 4pm to 8pm.

UPDATES…

Also in Comedy/Music: Heart of Darkness at Union Hall in Park Slope. Comedian Kate Berlant, music by The Bowery Riots and The Forgiveness. Saturday 8/18 at 8pm. $8 advance, $10 at the door.

Also in Film: Festival Express screening (documentary on Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead and The Band’s train ride together) at City Winery on Varick St. Sunday 8/19, doors opne 6pm. Film at 7:30. FREE

For more ongoing summer weekend suggestions see our previous Culture on the Cheap posts here, here, here and here. Also: check back throughout the weekend for possible updates.

August 16, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

FreelandBuck: Slipstream

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New York and Los Angeles based architectural firm FreelandBuck, run by principals David Freeland and Brennan Buck, has created an installation currently on exhibit at the Bridge Gallery in NYC titled Slipstream.

…Architects have used digital software to imbue structures and spaces with some of the same qualities as Da Vinci’s meticulous drawings: fluidity, undulation, instability and temporality. But while software has allowed architects to create novel, dynamic forms digitally, they have struggled to translate these qualities to the physicality of the material world. Slipstream is a physical structure that confronts that leap directly, translating a 2-dimensional digital line drawing into 3-dimensional space.

Alluding to Lebbeus Woods’ 2010 ‘Slipstreaming’ drawings of flow, the installation is a single drawing extruded through the gallery space and cut away to produce a set of interconnected spaces. The linear extrusion acts as both structure and dynamic visual filter, shifting views through the installation and between the spaces it defines. It’s integrity as a structure is masked by both its redundancy and bright coloration.

The exhibit runs through August 24th at the Bridge Gallery on Orchard Street.

Photos courtesy of the architects; Carles Faus; and the Bridge Gallery.

via archdaily

August 15, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus

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A couple of days ago we passed by Columbus Circle on our way uptown and noticed massive amounts of scaffolding around the Christopher Columbus statue. I assumed they were doing some repairs but, as it turns out, not at all. Em pointed me to the NY Times article that announced the new Public Art work by Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi, currently being built and due to debut on September 20th. The plan is to build a living room complete with couches, lamps and even a TV that surrounds the statue, six stories up from the ground. Visitors will be able to climb stairs or take an elevator up to the floating living room with Christopher Columbus’ head popping through the floor. Sounds very zany but very fun, too.

This is not the first time, nor probably the last, that Tatzu Nishi does something like this. Other similar ventures include surrounding a statue of Queen Victoria in Liverpool, England, with a temporary functioning hotel; creating a one-room apartment over the roof of a 14th-century cathedral — enclosing a bronze, angel-shaped weather vane — in Basel, Switzerland; and building a temporary hotel suite around the Merlion fountain in Singapore.

Discovering Columbus will be open to the public from September 20 to November 18, 2012. Admission will be free, but visitors will be required to reserve timed passes in advance through the Public Art Fund website.
UPDATE: FOLLOW-UP HERE.

Photos courtesy of the artist and the New York Times.

via The New York Times

August 13, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Piracy: Musician Mosaics from CDs

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These are impressive. Italian artists/designers Mirco Pagano and Moreno De Turco created these cd mosaics of seven classic deceased musicians for an ad campaign by U.S. ad agency TBWA and also an exhibition. The idea behind the project, titled Piracy, is that musicians are being brought down by internet piracy. The cds used in each portrait are that of each individual musician’s music. The musical artists include: Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, Jimmy Hendrix, James Brown, Elvis, and Michael Jackson. The typographic sculptures of the title are also well done.

Here is an animated video clip as well:

via visual news

August 13, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Cool Pool at Holiday Inn Shanghai

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Jutting out from the 24th floor of the Holiday Inn Shanghai Pudong Kangqiao Hotel is a cantilevered windowed cube containing a glass-bottomed swimming pool. This very cool pool was designed, along with the rest of the hotel interior, by Singapore based architects Chan Sau Yan Associates. 30 meters long and 6 meters wide the pool offers views on three sides of its enclosure, plus above and below. It’s hard to decide what is more striking: to witness someone swimming above from the ground, or to be the person swimming looking down at the ground.

via juxtapoz, cnn, and trip advisor

August 2, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Jim Lambie: Taped Surfaces

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I love it when random bits of information coincidentally relate to other random bits of information. There’s that ridiculously satisfying “Aha” moment, where you feel like Sherlock Holmes or Columbo, but without having done any real sleuthing. That’s how I feel with respect to my recent revelations about Jim Lambie, a Scottish visual artist. Last fall, I happened upon an exhibit of Lambie’s work at the Anton Kern Gallery in Chelsea. My favorite pieces involved concave, colorful conical forms embedded within large photographs of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Later I spotted another similar piece at the NY Frieze Art Fair. Around the same time I did a post on an interesting townhouse renovation in our neighborhood, and creepily photographed the colorful staircase with its tape design from the window. Fast forward to today, when I came across photos of interesting taped floors created by none other than Jim Lambie. Among these images I found the same Greenwich Village staircase taken from inside and above. So, yes, you’ve probably made the mad leap yourself by now: Jim Lambie, who transforms spaces with his very cool taped geometric mazes of color, was the artist whose exhibit I saw in Chelsea and a few weeks later admired his impressive design work on the local staircase. Case closed.

Photos courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, Thyssen-Bornemisza, floorcrunch and collabcubed.

via balladora

July 30, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Hong Chun Zhang: Hairy Art

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Chinese artist Hong Chun Zhang, now living and working in Kansas, has found a balance between her Chinese and American artistic educations and cultures. Her painting and drawing foundation from China was very rigorous, but her content choices are now less restricted due to her US exposure.

Much of her work revolves around hair, something she identifies with, and characterizes her to some degree through her own long hair, in addition to being something Zhang finds both beautiful and at times repulsive. She has charcoal drawings on larger-than-life scrolls to emphasize the length, and very realistic oil paintings on the subject matter as well. She also combines hair with everyday objects to make humorous and surreal pieces.

From the artist:
Twin Spirits are large charcoal hair drawings, self-portraits of my twin sister and me. I use long hair to exaggerate our major characteristic and as a metaphor to reveal something that is beyond the hair. These drawings are presented as scroll paintings in order to accentuate the length of the piece and the flow of long hair. The larger than life-size scale creates a three-dimensional effect that extends the meaning beyond the surface. My most recent drawings and paintings on hair, however, is a new approach from personal to more universal. This time, long hair is meant to examine a woman’s complete life cycle.

Here is an interview with Hong Chun Zhang:

via white rabbit gallery

July 26, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Shelter ByGG: Gabriela Gomes

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This cloud-shaped, cocoon-like shelter is the design of Portuguese architect Gabriela Gomes. The bright red exterior is made of a unique non-polluting, recycled cork, with a minimalist interior that consists of a double room with bathroom using ecological materials in its construction and solar paneling for energy as well as LED lighting, keeping with its sustainable goal. The mobile habitat—that goes by the name Shelter ByGG—seems to be taking reservations and will be delivered via flatbed truck to a series of locations. You can make your reservations here.

Photos by Joao Morgado and renderings courtesy of the architect.

via contemporist

July 25, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Shi Jindian: Steel Wire Sculptures

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There’s a strange juxtaposition in Chinese artist Shi Jindian’s steel wire sculptures. His subject matter tends to be, for the most part, solidly masculine with motorcycles and military vehicles as prime examples, but his delicate wire mesh sculptures make them look delicate and almost ethereal. Jindian’s pieces are reminiscent of Do Ho Suh’s work, but only in that they are light and translucent, the technique, oddly enough, is more comparable to Olek’s crocheted works. Shi Jindian learned, by trial and error, how to crochet the two-dimensional strands of wire into three-dimensional forms using tools of his own devising. His wire meshes start out as wrappings around common objects. When the mesh is complete, he destroys or extracts the object, leaving only its steel “shadow”. Each of the works takes years to make and is accurate to the smallest detail.

Photos: saviems; and Arrested Motion

via White Rabbit Gallery and beautiful decay

July 24, 2012 by collabcubed - 2 Comments

Vincent Ganivet: Cinder Block Sculptures

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French artist Vincent Ganivet creates gravity-defying sculptures using concrete cinder blocks, bricks, straps, sometimes wood, and metal. These mostly large-scale works arch and twist in impressive ways, all the while staying balanced in place. Pretty amazing.

Photos courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery

July 24, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Metro Valencia: Luis Ferrer

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I love this new metro/subway station Estación de Metro Carolines-Benimàmet in Valencia, Spain, designed by architect Luis Ferrer. The multi-colored glass boxes-within-a-box design not only gives the station a light appearance, as if floating over a bed of stones, but each box serves a purpose as well: two function as emergency stairs, one as office space, and the largest contains the ticket booths, elevator banks, and escalators. The colors and prints on the glass, apart from looking great, refer to the basic elements of earth, water, fire, and air, adding increasing warmth as one descends to the lower levels (perhaps a nod to the underworld?) The light fixtures and furniture were all designed in the architect’s studio with the idea of mass-production in mind for future stations.

It’s all fun, smart and beautiful as all design should be.

Photos by David Frutos and also courtesy of the architect.

July 19, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Mariska de Groot: Quadtone

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This looks interesting. Dutch designer and artist Mariska de Groot has recently developed an undercurrent fascination for straight forms, stroboscopic movement and analogue machines. She started building cinematic instruments and installations based on optical sound–moving form and light to create sound—as soon as she came in contact with the principle of synthetic sound on film.

Earlier this month at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, as part of their Graduation Exhibition, de Groot exhibited/performed her piece Quadtone-Lumisonic Rotera.

‘Quadtone – lumisonic rotera’ is a mesmerising light-is-sound projection performance in space. Graphical patterned wheels code a beam of light, which portable light-sensitive speakers convert into audible frequencies. All leftover light is visual sound.

Here is her Light Synth piece in action:

The rotating discs are beautiful in themselves!

Photos: Ed Jansen and KABK

via Ed Jansen’s flickr

July 12, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Holmenkollen Ski Jump: JDS Architects

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Holmenkollen near Oslo, Norway, has a history of hosting legendary ski jumping competitions, but after their ski jump was deemed too small in 2005, a competition was held to build a new jump. JDS Architects, based in Copenhagen, were the winners out of 104 entries. Their dramatic design is clad in a mesh of stainless steel with a 69-meter cantilever that rises 58 meters in the air.

From the JDS’ website:
Rather than having a series of dispersed pavilions on site, our design unifies the various amenities into one holistic diagram. The judges booths, the commentators, the trainers, the Royal family, the VIPs, the wind screens, the circulations, the lobby, the entrance to the arena and the arena itself, the lounge for the skiers, the souvenir shop, the access to the existing museum, the viewing public square at the very top, everything, is contained into the shape of the jump. The resulting simplicity of the solution improves the experience of the spectators and brings clear focus to the skiers jumping.

Some of these shots alone give me vertigo. I can’t even fathom plunging down on skis, being that I barely make it down a bunny slope.

All photos by Hufton + Crow

via frame

July 11, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Beatriz Leyton: Family Life

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In her work titled Family Life, Chilean artist Beatriz Leyton creates large tableaus illustrating the rooms in a typical home—kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room—using pins. Why pins? To depict the fragility of the home and family as well as the illusion of the ‘American Dream’.

Leyton uses thousands of pins against black fabric which give these pieces a glow-in-the-dark type of effect. The perspective alone is impressive.

via macro museo

July 10, 2012 by collabcubed - 1 Comment

Cildo Meireles: Fontes (Fountains/Sources)

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Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles wasn’t always a fan of conceptual art, but in the 1970s he started to create works in protest of Brazil’s military dictatorship. These interactive/performance works carried political messages in a poetic way.

Meireles reflects:

…When a work of art kidnaps you for a fraction of a second, it takes you to another time …I realized that, of all the movements that I had studied, conceptual art was the only one that didn’t use any of the things linked to art: inks, brushes, canvases. It could be made from anything. It gave complete freedom. It is the most democratic way to produce art that has come up. That is something that deserves credit.

Meireles’s works typically revolve around space, dimension, and time. His installation Fontes (Fountains/Sources) is a perfect example. Using 6,000 rulers, 1,000 clocks, and 500,000 vinyl numbers, along with a soundtrack, Meireles invites spectators to interact with the work, circulating through the paths created by the hanging rulers.

Here’s a video from a first person perspective:

Photos: Ihall’s flickr; Jock303’s flickr; Penny Jones’ flickr; and the artist.

via arte al limite

July 10, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Pascal Broccolichi: Sound Installations

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French sound and visual artist Pascal Broccolichi creates installations that envision sound as a vocabulary of forms, but whose focus is on listening. In his piece Raccorama (top four photos) Broccolichi takes mica dust and places it in identical heaps, following a specific pattern which is then emphasized by iodide spotlights. Loudspeakers play a sound piece simulating the patterns of sound flux in motion.

In a more recent work, and variation on the Raccorama theme, Broccolichi creates similar mica dust heaps, this time placing a loudspeaker in the center of each creating a crater. This installation titled Table d’harmonie (bottom photo), also plays a sound piece simulating sound flux in motion.

via LABoral

July 9, 2012 by collabcubed - 0 comments

Jonas Etter: Ephemeral Burnt Sugar Art

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Swiss artist Jonas Etter, based in Zurich, works in many mediums, including burnt sugar. These typographic sculptures and framed wallpieces are all made using the aforementioned substance. The burnt sugar melts due to heat and air moisture, turning the pieces into a sort of performance. The typographic sculptures are their own self-defining captions. As they melt and spread over the base, the works transform and invade the viewer’s space with their sticky puddles. The Wallpiece I-III are put on the wall immediately before the opening reception and the content slowly starts to flow out onto the ground.

via eye